Adrian Smith presented at the July 2010 Agile Academy Meetup in Brisbane on the topic of Agile for Startups. Here are my notes:
- startups should not last forever – transitional to success or failure
- need an idea or an idea where you can do better (copycat business)
- 90% of startups fail due to lack of customers
- good people are critical to success – technology is a lever to productivity, no more than in software development
- “The best programmers are up to 25 times better than the worst programmers” (Robert L. Glass)
- startup lifecycle – building customers vs building product
- aim for high quality code to reduce technical debt – will allow you to react faster
- an office is sometimes seen as an expression of rank, whereas the office in an agile team / startup should enable innovation
- use cloud based infrastructure to scale up and down and not be tied to any one location, also good for remote workers
- startups cannot support the same number of roles as a typical agile team, need to dual-role and work out priority
- startups can choose the technology, and that choice can govern the types of people that you can attract
Some of the tools that support agile startups:
- Skype – fantastic for collaboration, desktop sharing
- Yammer – effective to create internal collaboration within company, to share ideas, etc.
- Teleport – great for screen sharing, especially dual screens
- iChat for screen sharing
- Harvest for time tracking (low cost)
- Saasu (Australian), is like a better hosted MYOB, free for 20 transactions or less a month, payroll and BAS at the press of a button
- Pivotal Tracker for project management and Scrum, other tools around like Scrum Pad
- Unfuddle for ticketing, version control with GitHub
- Balsamiq for mockups, iPlotz has better functionality (low cost)
- CodeYak is in beta for code metrics and tracking over time
- Hudson for continuous integration, Pivotal Labs has a free dashboard (Pivotal Pulse)
- Heroku for deployment with a pure Git workflow, Linode for hosting
- GetSatisfaction for customer feedback, rating features, etc…
- Google Analytics for tracking web site traffic, Trendly for more meaningful interpretation
- Startup Search is a good place to see if somebody has else has done something you’re interested in
- Resources – The Four Steps To Epiphany by Steven G. Blank (free) and Getting Real from 37 Signals (free online)
Question and answer session:
- showcase in a startup – get deployed to deployment environment and get customers using it, using new features as they come along
- virtual office that make you seem big – a cost that you don’t need to spend, especially if using your own money
- key agile – setting consistent expectations in relation to code quality amongst all developers, need a minimum viable product to showcase
- collaborate closely with customers, have people on-site with customers who are using it, Skype calls to customers using the product
- starting with agile – determine your priority and make those tasks transparent, make sure you are working on priorities and to an agreed quality
- regret some features that were initially put in that were thought to be useful (make features work hard to get into the product initially)
- biggest obstacle is getting to a minimum viable product, risk that product is not usable or is superseded by another product
